


in the dark and out of harm

by trell (qunlat)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Established Relationship, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-Vault of the Rampager, Technopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21923731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: Lilith has always dealt with pain through immolation.
Relationships: Lilith/Patricia Tannis
Comments: 15
Kudos: 35





	in the dark and out of harm

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for the campaign.

Lilith vanishes after the funeral.

It makes Tannis feel a little guilty that she’s not the the first one to notice, the news relayed to her instead by the vault hunter with the helmet and the big guns. The little soldier barges in while she's running a genetic material trace on the Rampager slab, and informs her that no one’s seen Lilith _all day,_ and hadn’t somebody better look for her, emphasis on _somebody?_

Tannis assures the vault hunter that she will, and shoos her out so she can finish her work. While she precipitates out the DNA she tells herself that it’s only natural, really, that she wouldn’t notice; for once there are enough new Eridian artifacts to fully occupy even her voluminous intellect, and it’s not as though there’s anything anyone can do about Maya _now._ The time for figuring out a plan that didn’t play right into the Calypsos’ hands had been a week ago, and Tannis doesn’t believe in expending energy on things she can’t possibly change.

Still, she feels decidedly rotten as she pours her pre-prepared agar into its mold, and resolves to find Lilith at once. Sanctuary is their home, but for Lilith it’s been home longer than it has for everyone else, and that means that if she's decided to hide no one save Tannis stands a chance at tracking her down.

She invents and discards a half dozen means of pinpointing Lilith’s position as she loads the DNA samples into the gel, ranging from the crude (a ship-wide heat scan followed by a brute force comparison against the signatures of everyone who’s passed through the lab door) to the elegant (converting her toothbrush into a bona-fide Lilith detector, by way of some clever genomics and the bright red hair stuck to her sleeve). Each method suffers from the drawback of requiring at least several hours, which Tannis would rather not waste.

In the end she settles for the least scientific method of all, and asks Sanctuary to find her.

For all its enormous processing power, Sanctuary thinks slowly. The artificial genius of a spaceship is distributed too wide, invested too deep, to respond with the same eagerness as a single dedicated node; in addition to talking to her Sanctuary must fly and breathe and listen to the stars, all while keeping the hard vacuum out and the heat in. If Tannis wants to communicate she must send her query and wait, Sanctuary’s thoughts progressing around her at the unperturbed pace of some great and lumbering beast. Like a whale, maybe, if whales carried civilization in their bellies, and made physics-defying leaps from one side of the galaxy to the other.

In retrospect, a whale is a stupid analogy.

Question asked, she stands with her palm to the wall (contact isn’t necessary, but faced with something as outré as true technopathy she allows herself this irrationality) and listens to Sanctuary mull over her inquiry, trying not to let her impatience bleed through. She doesn’t believe in being polite to _people_ , but she tries to be polite with the ship, on the basis that its goodwill is the only thing standing between her and explosive decompression.

After some five minutes of thought Sanctuary gives her an answer, and Tannis goes to track down her wife.

She finds Lilith in the top-level maintenance corridor with the extraneous viewport, as out-of-the-way a hiding place as they come. Getting there requires climbing up a rickety ladder in a narrow shaft that runs the full height of ship, but Tannis has done worse for less (the time with the cracked fragment of exactly _one-third_ of an Eridian rune comes to mind), and anyway the moment she sticks her head up into the corridor she sees that she’s made the right choice.

With her feet braced several rungs below the level of the corridor floor she can just rest her arms along the service shaft’s edge, and she pauses there, saying, “If you’re up here because the quantity of methanol in those bottles has ravaged your vision and made it impossible to climb down, do let me know. I’m sure I can find a way to regrow an optic nerve on a budget.”

The indistinct heap sprawled next to the viewport snorts, and shifts amid the surrounding empty bottles. “If you’re here to attempt to dissuade me from drinking myself to death, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” sniffs Tannis. “I’m here to join you, and thereby reduce your intake of toxic chemicals approximately by half.”

She pulls herself up out of the shaft, ducking against the low ceiling and proceeding at a stoop until she reaches the nook in which Lilith resides. The space is small—just enough for two people, provided those people don’t mind extremely close quarters—and she has to fold herself nearly in half to clamber over Lilith’s legs, aiming for the corner across from her beside the viewport.

In the dim light of the planetary penumbra she gets her first good look at Lilith’s face, and deduces that drinking herself to death is precisely the goal Lilith has set her sights on. Lilith looks— _abominable_ , there’s a suitable word, and also _shitawful,_ if Tannis is willing to lower herself to compound terms. Lilith’s face is gray, her eyes bloodshot, and there’s no need to count up the bottles to tell that she’s wretchedly drunk.

Tannis settles between the viewport and Lilith’s legs, and thrusts out her hand for the bottle. “Come on, then. That diethylene glycol won’t drink itself.”

“Who says I’m sharing,” broods Lilith—but hands over the bottle, anyway, venting a rattling sigh.

Tannis brings the bottle suspiciously up to her nose, and jerks sharply back as the caustic smell sears up her nostrils. “ _What_ are you drinking? Even the radiator swill those Atlas imbeciles keep brewing up in the cargo hold isn’t so foul.” The radiator swill has its merits, mind her; it’s an excellent industrial solvent, for one thing, and finally got those saurian bloodstains out of her floor.

“The guy who sold it to me claimed it was genuine Promethean fire whiskey,” Lilith says. And then, thoughtfully, “Might be paint thinner, though. _Tastes_ like paint thinner.”

“The _things_ I do for you,” complains Tannis, and pinches her nose shut to tip back the bottle.

Thirty seconds of vicious coughing later (“Told you,” says Lilith) Tannis sets the bottle aside, well out of Lilith’s reach, and reports, “I think we can safely rule out any chance of _that_ being Promethean fire whiskey. Two trials—reproducible results.” She interrupts herself to emit a low, acidic burp. “Three cheers for the scientific method.”

Lilith tilts her head back against the wall, her eyes closing. “Right. Hand it over.”

“Tell me why you’re up here,” says Tannis, “and I’ll consider it.”

“Shit. Patricia Tannis, here to play armchair counselor.” Lilith’s tone is exhausted more than derisive, like she can’t muster up the energy to be cruel.

“Patricia Tannis,” counters Tannis, “here to check on the vital signs of her _spouse_. Unless I’ve missed even more social cues than I thought, and that palladium ring I received from you all those years ago really was just for show?”

“You melted it down,” Lilith enunciates, “to make a _capacitor._ ”

“All for a good cause—I had to test my hypothesis regarding the reactivity of Eridian power sources to alternating currents. A _disproved_ hypothesis is no less valuable to the march of progress, you know.” Tannis frowns, and manages to refrain from launching into a full-scale tirade on the suboptimal methodologies of her competitors. “But as much as I enjoy expounding upon the merits of my method, Lilith, that’s not why I’m here.”

“No, you’re here to drag me over what happened with Maya,” snaps Lilith. “Or what I said about Maya, or what Ava said about Maya, or all three of those things, I don’t know. What I’m saying now is, I don’t want to talk about it.” She grabs for one of the bottles scattered around her, lifting it up to squint at whatever remains at the bottom, and makes a disgusted sound. “Or didn’t you get that from the part where I told an orphan girl who’s lost her only guardian to _focus on the mission?”_

“We all said things we regret,” Tannis says, though her own fumbled eulogy hardly registers on the scale of things deserving of her attention. “I’m no expert in the traumatized teenage psyche, but I imagine Ava will work her away around to that phase of the agony of social interaction, too.”

Lilith tosses the bottle aside, her right hand closing into a fist. “She shouldn’t. Everything she said was true.” Then, as she seizes another bottle to inspect: “I need to figure my shit _out_. And if I can’t do that—shit, if I can’t do that, I need to step down. Cede to you, or Ellie, or anyone on this dump who can actually _lead._ ” Bitterness seeps poisonously into her tone. “All this time I thought was a natural-born leader. Turns out the only thing I was a natural at was being a siren.” The second bottle follows after the other, this time with rather more force.

Incredulous, Tannis says, “Cede command? To me? To _Ellie?_ Lilith, are you listening to yourself?” Her own pitch rises sharply into the shrill. “You _are_ a natural leader. No one on this appalling tugboat is here for the privilege of having a target painted on their back for Tyreen Calypso. They’re here because of _you,_ because they believe in you, whether or not you’re the Firehawk. You inspire the slack-jawed masses, Lilith.” She winds down. “Neither Ellie nor I can do that.”

“All I’m doing,” Lilith says contemptuously, “is coasting along on my old fame. The person who _inspires_ them is the Hero of Pandora, and she’s dead.”

“Am I speaking to a corpse, then? Because the woman who inspired me to leave my dig site appears to be present before me.” Tannis considers this. “Admittedly, she’s not being very inspirational at the moment, but that’s hardly indicative of her overall merit.”

“Every decision I’ve made since this started has been wrong.” Something changes in Lilith's voice, then, and Tannis can hear the fragments of her pain, surfacing from within the stream of her anger. “Everything I’ve done has gotten people killed.”

“That’s what happens in wars, Lilith! People die in droves, usually pointlessly, usually because of someone’s decision.” Tannis winces, realizing she’s put her foot in it again, but presses on, “That doesn’t mean you should stop making them. It doesn’t even mean it was the wrong decision to make, for god’s sake.”

“Maya survived Pandora.” Lilith goes on as if she hasn’t heard, her voice growing rockier still. “Maya survived the Warrior. Hell, she survived _Jack._ She survived _everything,_ except _me_.”

“You didn’t kill her,” says Tannis, and she could just seize Lilith by the shoulders and _scream,_ if only there were a little more room. As it is, all she can do is say the words, nearly furious herself.

 _Damn_ Ava for putting more guilt on Lilith’s shoulders.

“Yeah?” Lilith says. “Yeah? Could’ve fooled me.” Her teeth bare in a ghastly smile, and her left hand gestures theatrically out into the passage. “Hey, Maya, wanna join the crew—come see the galaxy with the Raiders, find the Great Vault—get murdered by the Calypsos—ring a bell?”

Tannis opens her mouth to protest. She means to say something like, _as if you could have stopped her,_ or _you don’t control people’s choices,_ or any number of reasonable things—but Lilith makes a miserable, damp sound, and curls in on herself, pulling in her legs to hide her face against her knees. Startled, Tannis says, “Lilith,” reaching unthinkingly towards her—

And realizes that Lilith has started to cry, her shoulders shaking.

Tannis freezes.

She isn’t good at this. She’s _never_ been good at this, any of it, the consoling or the meaningful gestures or the knowing how to react. In all her vast lexicon of knowledge these not-so-irrelevant human niceties simply don’t feature, as impervious to her as the mumbling language of machines is to everyone else. A closed book, even when it comes to the woman she loves.

She has _no idea_ what to do.

She wishes that Roland were here. Roland would have known; Roland would have had just the right thing to say, to make Lilith listen, and convince her that Maya _wasn’t her fault._

But Roland is dead in the ground, and the only one here is Tannis—here because of his death as much as she is because of anything, and.

And Lilith is crying, guilt and grief tearing out of her in hoarse sobs, and Tannis doesn’t know what to _do_.

Stopping her tears would be easy. Tannis could engineer a retrovirus to deaden Lilith's lacrimal glands, or inject her with dopamine, inhibiting her brain from producing prolactin. She could, in her scientific genius, come up with any number of ways to remediate this particular symptom of grief; but she can’t mend Lilith’s ravaged Firehawk heart, incinerated again like her namesake bird. It had been Roland then—it’s Maya now—it’ll be someone else next, and with her powers gone Lilith can't work out her misery through the Firehawk's violence, turning her suffering outward to burn away her pain.

Lilith has always dealt with pain through immolation. It's only natural, then, that in the absence of her powers she would turn that impulse inward, and burn the only person she can.

Tannis, sitting across from her, thinks: _I wish you would burn me, instead._

She’s never been one for self-sacrifice. That’s another thing that sets her and Roland apart, another thing that Roland knew how to do and she doesn’t; but for Lilith she’d burn, even just to slow the phoenix-fire’s consumption. Lilith isn’t everything—Tannis has other pursuits, other dreams, other reasons to inflict her genius upon the universe—but she is _significant,_ in the way of a digit contributing to the final measurement resolution. In Tannis’ personal decimal she is a number of consequence, unspurious regardless of instrumental precision, and if Tannis could ease her pain merely by allowing herself to burn—she would.

If only it were that simple.

Tannis isn’t Roland. She can’t take Lilith’s pain away. All she can do is stay, and keep Lilith from burning alone.

She draws a breath, and reaches out to take Lilith’s hand.

Prying Lilith’s fingers free from where she’s hugging her knees takes work, but once Tannis accomplishes that Lilith's hand closes near-painfully on hers, grasping desperate. So broad a hint is decipherable even to Tannis, and she climbs across the small space to sit beside her, pressing their shoulders together.

Lilith turns, and buries her face against Tannis’ shoulder. “I _could have saved her_.” Her voice is wretched, and as Tannis brings wraps her arms around her she gets out, “If only I’d had my powers—if only that _bitch_ hadn’t taken them—”

The rest is lost to another wracking sob. Tannis understands, anyway.

_Maya would still be here._

There’s nothing she can argue against that, so she says only, “I know,” and buries her nose in Lilith’s hair, reverting to the imprecise language of flesh. Touch is blunt, difficult to interpret, and Tannis isn’t, really, any better at it than she is with words; but experience has taught her that for Lilith it can be a Rosetta Stone, serving to translate Tannis’ thoughts into a language that reaches her even despite her stubborn refusal to hear.

Tonight Tannis means to get across _I love you,_ and _It wasn’t your fault,_ and _I will break Tyreen Calypso with my own two hands, or at least with the hands of those four wonderfully talented homicidal maniacs we have in the hold, guided by my brilliant mind._

Lilith cries for a long time. They stay together in the alcove, wrapped up in each other, Lilith's tears petering off into silence; Tannis listens to the ship's heartbeat, and feels Lilith's heart keeping time.

Sanctuary, she thinks, grieves along with them, in its own gargantuan mechanical way.

They drift through the void, and hold fast to what remains. 


End file.
